Online social networking and communication services have become new forums for people to converse, socialize, and do business remotely without the need for face-to-face meetings. Mobile communication technology has also furthered ways in which individuals socialize by enabling communication while on the go. Such services and technologies provide users with instantaneous and continuous access to any other user or to any number of users simultaneously. However, these new means of remote communication often lack many of the social cues one gets when individuals are communicating in the same place. Various methods have come about that, to some extent, help make up for the lack of social cues. One such method is to exchange between individuals, or to publish on social communication networks, presence and activity information of the individuals. As an example, such information may inform others about the level of activity and attentiveness of an individual in a social communication network or about an individual's current availability to converse.
Many types of presence and activity information have been developed and some standards have emerged that attempt to formalize the structure of such information. For instance, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a professional community which develops and publishes standards pertaining to Internet use, has published RFC 4480, a specification that defines several types of rich presence data. Another standardization effort is known as Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) attempts to provide a format for exchanging attention information and can be found at the URL http://apml.pbwiki.com.
The typical way in which such information is disseminated is to turn broadcasting of the information either “on” or “off” for others to see. Additionally, when a user is broadcasting presence or activity information and is logged into multiple social networking services, other users of the different services typically see the same information. No clear ways have emerged to control a fine level of detail, or granularity of the information or to control the dissemination based on which social communication services and networks the user is present.